Booker shortlisted author, Daisy Johnson’s Long Wave is multi-generational story of secrets, obsessions, longing, trauma and love, close to the shore is the island, uninhabited, wild with only a storm-beaten lighthouse for shelter. Ori was found there as a small child with a handful of stones, no memories and no mother. When she has a baby of her own, the job of motherhood feels immense and sleepless nights begin to shatter her grip in reality. Her head fills with the sound of stones knocking against each other and the mystery of her past begins to unravel opening up a path to the mother she lost, and the mother she could become.

Years earlier, on a sweltering summer day, ten-year-old Ruth sees a woman and her baby walk into the river and disappear. But she is the only witness, and the water yields no trace. Ruth’s mother, Edith, locks her daughter away -first to restrain these wild imaginings, and later, when she falls pregnant, to hide the shame. Ruth longs to escape and dreams of the nearby island, where she and her baby can finally be free.

Long Wave island is enigmatic and alluring, where teenager Ruth is roiling in desire  and frustration, longs for a place to escape her controlling mother. For Ori too, abandoned as child and now struggling in her own newborn, the island promises to solve the mystery of her origins. 

The island for Ruth puzzlingly described “like sunburn, that dwindles and ebbs and then is roused once more, carried always within her, a secret ache of somewhere else, something else”. 

Johnson is acute on Ori’s postnatal depression, the exhaustion that feels “like a suffocating, papery snow”.

Long Wave by Daisy Johnson, Jonathan Cape £18.99, 288 pages.